Sinbad The Sailor wrote:
I have a wirless network with an old, cobbled together out of spare parts pc
that I have put by my TV/hi-fi and am using it to stream media (mp3, browse
the web and watch mpeg, mov movie trailers etc on).

It is an AMD K2-350 with an nVidia manufactured ELSA Gladiac 32MB 311TV-OUT
Card with an
s-video socket for TV out. I can output at 640x480 to my CRT television. For
web browsing and viewing Windows media player on mp3 it is ideal. However,
it is unable to refresh the video when playing movie clips, etc.

Time for an upgrade. I have an AMD K2-500 with a decent 80gb hard disk and
300mb memory but no AGP slot, so I need to put in a PCI graphics card. The
problem is I am on a very tight budget (ideally under £30.00).

What is the minimum I could get away with to play back video clips via an
s-video out -

A GeForce MX4000 64MB PCI
http://www.dabs.com/uk/channels/comp...quicklinx=2ZZY
Or Radeon 9200SE 128MB PCI
http://www.dabs.com/uk/channels/comp...R&familyid=186

Or something much more ballsy?



Besides any GPU assited post processing, you'll want to turn off any
kind of codec post filtering (deringing, deblocking, especially grain
effects). Take off double buffering if you don't need it and use a
regular overlay mode instead of any VMR or DirectX surfaces.

As a side note, that K6-2 500 is crap. Very crap. It doesn't support
instruction sets properly, has limited 3DNow support, and a small and
BAD L2 cache. I've owned one myself though . A meager Celeron
400/433 can easily best it at any CPU intensive task and that's the most
important factor in decoding complex codecs like XVid, DivX, etc.

See if you can wrangle a P3 board with a 1ghz FCPGA core. Slot P3's are
still around, but the socket boards are better overall. Check some flea
markets and such. And for any HTPC application, the MX4000 is more than
enough.